Ground Canvas
37 images Created 5 Mar 2021
When you walk too long, you watch the ground too much.
Excerpt from ©Paul Salopek :
"The scarce litter scattered in the Earth’s roadless spaces, as opposed to the tidal waves of waste generated in the industrialized world, generally hint at an equally rare and vanishing lifestyle: rambling animal herders, mobile people who still roam the globe the way humankind did in the Neolithic. Today the United Nations estimates that, at most, some 500 million people still survive on such ancient pastoral economies. That’s just 7 percent of the human family. And the ranks of the world’s remnant pastoralists are under increasing assault by agribusiness, climate change, and conflict.
National Geographic photographer Matthieu Paley has been noticing, documenting—and collecting—discarded nomad artifacts in the wilds of Central and South Asia for many years. During a recent assignment in the austere Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges that cleave the frontiers of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan in the Wakhan Corridor, he frequently lowered his camera from panoramas of 20,000-foot peaks to refocus on what was lying right at his boot tips: a humble strip of polyester ripped from nomad girl’s sweater, a twist of worn rope, or a tuft of yak wool snagged from a passing caravan on the thorns of a wild rose bush."
Story here:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/articles/2017-12-ground-canvas/
Excerpt from ©Paul Salopek :
"The scarce litter scattered in the Earth’s roadless spaces, as opposed to the tidal waves of waste generated in the industrialized world, generally hint at an equally rare and vanishing lifestyle: rambling animal herders, mobile people who still roam the globe the way humankind did in the Neolithic. Today the United Nations estimates that, at most, some 500 million people still survive on such ancient pastoral economies. That’s just 7 percent of the human family. And the ranks of the world’s remnant pastoralists are under increasing assault by agribusiness, climate change, and conflict.
National Geographic photographer Matthieu Paley has been noticing, documenting—and collecting—discarded nomad artifacts in the wilds of Central and South Asia for many years. During a recent assignment in the austere Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges that cleave the frontiers of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan in the Wakhan Corridor, he frequently lowered his camera from panoramas of 20,000-foot peaks to refocus on what was lying right at his boot tips: a humble strip of polyester ripped from nomad girl’s sweater, a twist of worn rope, or a tuft of yak wool snagged from a passing caravan on the thorns of a wild rose bush."
Story here:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/articles/2017-12-ground-canvas/
